Recently, with Labour’s new budget which included VAT on private school fees and inheritance tax on farms, Beth Rigby, the Sky News political editor asked Prime Minister Keir Starmer if he was engaged in “class war”.
These labels are only ever thrown around when a (mildly) left-wing government assumes power. Class warfare was not levied as an accusation by anyone in the mainstream press outside of a couple of Guardian opinion columnists at any of the actions of the previous Tory government.
Was austerity not class warfare? Do the 190,000 excess deaths caused by this policy agenda not constitute class warfare? Was the wrecking of our public services and councils by chronic underfunding not class warfare?
There is a blindness to one side of class war, that being the class warfare inflicted upon the working class by the upper class; that sort of class conflict is simply accepted as the status-quo. On the other hand, the attempts to invert this hierarchy, however minor that attempt is, is seen as class war.
What this demonstrates is that our political and media class do not see it that way. Class war is not a term to be used descriptively, but instead as a slur against any attempt to challenge the power of the most wealthy and privileged people in society (even with such a mild attempt by this Labour government).
This also serves another purpose, by accusing a centre-left government that abandoned most of its actually left-wing pledges of engaging in class warfare, it helps to put a limit on the acceptable spectrum of politics. If this mild change, which does not do anything to upset the already established system is given the radical slur of “class war”, then any policies that are more left-wing are therefore implicitly seen as inconceivable.
This is important to call out as it shows a greater trend in society at large, that being our general blindness to the suffering and inequalities of the status-quo, and our revulsion at lesser evils and sacrifices being committed in order to change it. When people tell you that an alternative to our current system “wouldn’t work”, you should ask them, in what sense does our system work?
“Teachers’ Strike” by eilidh_wag is licensed under CC BY 2.0.